March 4, 2007
By VIRGINIA ROHAN
Mario Baeza saw a gaping hole in the American television landscape.
The Englewood businessman -- who as a 7-year-old had come to the United States from Cuba in 1958 -- was especially vexed about this glaring gap when his daughters, now college students, were small.
"My kids grew up in a real bilingual home. My father really insisted we keep up our Spanish, and that was something we wanted to make sure got passed down to the next generation," says Baeza, who also has a 14-year-old son. "Of course, kids like to spend a lot of time in front of the television, watching shows like 'Barney,' 'Sesame Street' -- and I remember distinctly that there was nothing like that you [could] find in the Spanish language 10 years ago. In the back of my mind, I thought, there's a need for better quality programming in Spanish."
Other Latinos, he came to realize, shared the same feeling: "There's got to be something more to life than 'Sᢡdo Gigante' " ("Giant Saturday"), a three-hour variety show that is one of the longest running programs on Spanish television.
That alternative finally arrives with tomorrow's launch of V-me, a 24-hour national digital broadcast network reaching 28 million homes that will offer Spanish-language programming for children and adults. Baeza is its founder and executive chairman.
Initially, 18 public television stations -- including New York's WNET/Channel 13 -- have agreed to carry V-me (pronounced "veh-meh") on the additional channels that became available when they converted to a digital broadcast signal. Those markets -- which also include Miami, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles and many areas of California -- account for 60 percent of the Spanish speakers in the United States, who'll receive V-me if it's carried by their cable or satellite provider.
New Jersey viewers with Comcast digital cable will be able to see V-me on Channel 242 and Cablevision customers will be able to tune in on Channel 199.
"About 20 to 25 percent of the programming will be Spanish-language adaptations of public television programs," says V-me President Carmen DiRienzo, who had been vice president and managing director of corporate affairs at WNET. "We are doing some wonderful original production and co-productions, and then the remainder of the schedule will be acquisitions from other sources."
Shows will not have commercials but will carry the kind of corporate underwriting and sponsorship reminders PBS programs have.
A special passion
V-me -- from the Spanish "veme," meaning "see me" -- is an unusual public-private partnership between the Educational Broadcasting Corp., WNET's parent, and two investment firms, including Baeza's company, The Baeza Group.
"He's wonderful, charming and smart about finding a way to do this," DiRienzo says of Baeza. "He has experienced the life of those we reach out to, so he was very personally involved and had personal passions."
V-me's lineup includes a six-hour block of "high-quality preschool" programming in the morning featuring, among other things, "Plaza Sesamo." (This Spanish-language adaptation of "Sesame Street," produced in Mexico, airs weekly on selected PBS stations and commercial station TeleFutura.)
V-me will be heavy on daytime lifestyle programming (cooking, parenting, beauty, fitness, travel). At 10 p.m., V-me will air an original nightly interview show, "Viva Voz" (in full voice), featuring guests from the spectrum of politics, journalism, business and entertainment.
"We want to come right out of the box with a signature program that says, 'We respect and understand the diversity of the Hispanic population and know that people would like to hear from one another, across the board,' " DiRienzo says. "That's a good part of what we're here for -- to provide more choice."
At 11 p.m., the network will show Latino films.
Tellingly, the V-me lineup includes only one telenovela, the Spanish equivalent of U.S. soap operas that are a staple on other Spanish-language networks during daytime and prime time. But V-me's telenovela, "Nuestro Barrio," will have instructive elements. DiRienzo describes it as a family drama that will incorporate themes like financial literacy.
The biggest factor that made this new network possible, Baeza says, was the FCC's 1999 decision to allocate a spectrum for additional digital channels to each of the nation's 348 public television stations, so that they "wouldn't be left behind."
About five years ago, when broadcasters began to convert to digital transmission, DiRienzo says, "many of us thought how wonderful it would be to reach out and be of greater service to the Hispanic population."
Baeza, who has lived in Englewood for 25 years, says he joined the WNET board "with the clear objective in mind of trying to develop this channel that would reach Hispanics."
The great diversity of the Latino community -- which embraces people from many countries -- has been a challenge for commercial networks like Univision and Telemundo. But Baeza says V-me will take a different approach.
"The big Spanish media is more focused on where you came from," he says, whereas V-me will focus more on the "new separate and distinct culture" Latinos are creating in America as they enter the melting pot. It also will play to their commonality.
Unifying cultures
"All the surveys that look at this quilt of all the different Latino cultures [show that] 80 to 90 percent of all Latinos have something in common; basic, core values that they share; emphasis on family, religion; and of course, the Spanish language. And those are very unifying things," Baeza says.
And the remaining 10 to 20 percent? "We have allowed each of our affiliate stations to insert three hours a week, which they can customize," says Baeza, chairman and CEO of The Baeza Group, an investment firm that concentrates on the U.S. Hispanic market and Latin America and is heavily involved in media and entertainment ventures.
Baeza has owned two ABC affiliates, and he founded the independent record label AJM, which launched pop singer Ashanti's career.
In the years since Baeza's daughters were kids -- they are now students at Cornell University -- the need for a network like V-me became increasingly apparent, he says. "Over those 10 years, as you watched the growth in the Spanish market and the growth in Latinos' purchasing power, it was not only something that would be nice, but something that would be compelling."
Source: NorthJersey.com
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